Fact Check: US Food Crisis Not Caused by Lack of Indonesia-Style Food Estates

In August 2026, a content creator named Benny Batara Hutabarat posted a podcast episode to his YouTube channel claiming that the United States faced a food emergency precisely because it lacked the kind of large-scale agricultural development projects that Indonesia had pursued. The video, titled "US Food Emergency: Food Prices Up 20 Percent," drew over 300,000 views and was reshared across Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. In it, Hutabarat, founder of Bennix Investor Group, argued that American food prices had climbed between 20 and 100 percent from 2019 to 2026—the steepest rise in half a century—and that this crisis stemmed directly from the country's failure to adopt Indonesia-style food estates. "The richest country in the world is currently crying in the corner because they don't have food estates like the ones in Indonesia," he said.

The claim deserves scrutiny, and when fact-checkers at Tempo examined it against actual data and expert analysis, the picture became far more complicated. Yes, American food prices had risen sharply. According to the Associated Press, the increase averaged 33 percent since 2019. From June 2025 to June 2026 alone, the Consumer Price Index for food climbed 3.5 percent, part of a broader inflation wave that also saw energy prices jump 15.7 percent. The human toll was real: a Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey released in May 2026 found that 10 percent of Americans had experienced food shortages in the previous year, while 16 percent relied on government assistance. These figures more than doubled the rates recorded in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when only 4 percent reported shortages.

But the causes bore no resemblance to Hutabarat's diagnosis. The price spikes stemmed from a cascade of external shocks. The 2020 pandemic had fractured supply chains and driven up labor and transportation costs. Droughts, storms, and avian flu had decimated livestock and crop production. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 had disrupted global oil and fertilizer supplies. New conflicts in the Middle East involving the United States, Israel, and Iran had added further pressure to food-related inflation in 2026. None of these problems would have been solved by adopting Indonesia's agricultural model.

The United States, in fact, operates on an entirely different agricultural foundation. Rather than government-directed land clearing and estate development, the U.S. system relies on nearly 1.9 million privately owned farming operations, which together contribute 5.6 percent of GDP and employ 10.4 percent of the workforce. The government's role is to support these private enterprises through crop insurance, price guarantees, disaster relief, and market access—not to acquire and develop massive tracts of land. Under the American Relief Act of 2025, the Department of Agriculture had already committed over $30 billion in disaster recovery assistance to farmers and ranchers. Teuku Riefky, a researcher at the Institute for Economic and Social Research at the University of Indonesia, confirmed that linking U.S. food prices to the absence of food estates was simply inaccurate. Isnawati Hidayah, a researcher at the Center of Economic and Law Studies, noted that the U.S. government does not engage in the kind of massive land clearing Indonesia pursues, instead meeting additional food needs through imports.

Moreover, Indonesia's own food estate projects—the very model Hutabarat held up as a solution—had failed to deliver on their promises. Launched in 2020 and continuing under successive administrations, these initiatives aimed to develop rice and corn cultivation across South Papua, Central Kalimantan, South Kalimantan, and South Sumatra. Yet as of October 2025, the government had realized only 10,368.83 hectares of new paddy field development, or just 4.61 percent of its target. The Audit Board of Indonesia deemed the original three-million-hectare goal unrealistic and found that even a revised target of 665,417 hectares for 2025 to 2029 was unlikely to be met, given the top-down approach imposed by the Ministry of Agriculture on regional agencies.

When Tempo investigated implementation on the ground in 2025, the picture grew darker. In Merauke, South Papua, land conditions proved inadequate. In Central Kalimantan, a food estate project launched in 2020 had largely stalled; observations between 2020 and 2023 found that only 1 percent of 243,216 hectares was truly suitable for agriculture, with much of the rest abandoned or converted to oil palm plantations. A cassava plantation project in Gunung Mas Regency failed entirely because crops could not grow on the land—and the attempt left forest degradation and flooding in its wake. These were not isolated failures. A similar megaproject under President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in 2010, the Merauke Integrated Food and Energy Estate program, had cleared 1.2 million hectares only to destroy sago forests belonging to local communities.

Perhaps most tellingly, Indonesia's food estate projects had not even succeeded in controlling domestic food prices. In June 2026, inflation in the "volatile food" category—shallots, rice, and garlic—reached 5.58 percent year-over-year, driven by declining production of those very commodities the estates were meant to boost. Isnawati observed that the food estate approach focused too heavily on production while neglecting distribution to consumers, and that Indonesia's food price control had relied largely on reactive measures like subsidized markets rather than building a sustainable system. The government, she said, needed to be far more serious about the work ahead.

When Tempo reached out to Hutabarat for comment via Instagram and WhatsApp, he did not respond. His claim—that America's food crisis stemmed from lacking Indonesia-style agricultural estates—rested on a false premise. The United States faced real food insecurity, driven by pandemic disruption, climate shocks, and geopolitical upheaval. Indonesia's food estates, meanwhile, had become a cautionary tale of ambitious targets, environmental costs, and minimal impact on the very food security they were designed to ensure.